🚀 go-pugleaf

This is a common problem with the ATK Help program and its rofftext
object. There are Ultrix and SunOS man pages which fail to display
correctly in Help for similar reasons.

Basically, I think the only way to get Help/rofftext to display these
correctly is to tinker with your ${ANDREWDIR}/lib/tmac/tmac.atk - you
may have to add every vendor-specific macro used by every man page to
the tmac.atk, because Help/rofftext does not know to look in
/usr/lib/tmac/tmac.an for macro definitions when processing man pages,
it only looks in ${ANDREWDIR}/lib/tmac/tmac.atk.

If you're running rofftext by hand, you can give it the "rofftext -man"
switch just as you'd invoke "nroff -man" by hand, but the Help
application doesn't point the rofftext object at the /usr/lib macros the
way it should.

There are other problems inherent to Help/rofftext's handling of man
pages that we (CMU's Academic Computing and Media) have reported to the
ITC over the years, and we would love to see them fixed before
patchlevel 10 is released. (hint hint :-) I guess we had given up by
now, but I'll mention it again just in case :-)

Another pet Help/rofftext peeve: many man pages do a ".so" to include a
different man page. But they assume that the current working directory
is /usr/man, so they do a ".so man3/foo.3" for example. And the "man"
program does a chdir to /usr/man (or whatever MANPATH element the file
was found under) before invoking nroff.

The rofftext object does NOT change the current working directory when
reading man pages the way the 'man' program does, and so this
relative-pathname reference fails.

Chris Koenigsberg, Senior User Consultant
ckk+@andrew.cmu.edu
Distributed Workstation Services, Carnegie-Mellon University
-------------------------
Excerpts from internet.info-andrew: 21-May-91 Help formatting problem
Susan Schwarz@northstar. (8475)


> I have recently ported NCAR Graphics V3.0 to our Sparcstations,  IBM RTs
> and RS600s and am having trouble getting the NCAR man pages to appear
> correctly when using the ATK help utility.  We are running ATK4 patch
> level 9. When I use  help to display the man pages,  many of the vowels 
> are missing from the text.   When I use the 'man' utility on them, the
> man pages appear correctly.

>  The NCAR man files reference a specific troff  macro file that comes
> with NCAR and I think that macro file may be causing the problem